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There’s this ongoing myth in public discourse that being a successful businessman means you have what it takes to successfully run a country. I see a lot of problems with this, to the point where I’d almost argue that the very opposite is true – that it makes you potentially bad at running a country. Countries and businesses are just inherently different structures on so many levels. A company may not even own the land its offices are based on, whereas a country covers a specific delineated territory. A business’ main purpose is generally to increase profits (though some prioritise doing so in a manner consistent with social justice or environmentally friendly policies – often recognising, however, that doing this is good for business too), while a country usually expects its government to improve the lives of its citizens.

To me the most important feature is embedded in that latter point of difference. A company does not have a fixed population. If it needs to reduce running costs, it can fire people. A country cannot do that. The only act that’s even vaguely similar is deporting people, which requires specific circumstances – normally that they’re citizens of another country who’ve committed a crime, or that they’ve committed a crime in another jurisdiction serious enough for an extradition request, or that they’ve overstayed a visa. In theory people made redundant from a company will go on to find other jobs, but whether they do or not isn’t a concern of the executives. In a country, people who lose their jobs can’t just be ignored. Improving people’s lives and increasing profits are completely different goals with completely different executions, the former being infinitely more complicated as you first attempt to define what improving lives means and then attempt to find policy that will interact with pre-existing conditions in such a way as to provide a good outcome. Ideally reducing beneficiary numbers means creating more jobs, not simply finding ways to get them off welfare.

But that’s what a fiscally right wing government does. They have a disproportionate number of ex-business people or people who expect to take up a cushy director job when they retire from politics or business owners and investors. They know about money, not people. And so we get trains made cheaply overseas that are riddled with asbestos, funding cuts to programs that pay off in the long term, policies aimed at reducing waiting lists for housing or surgeries. It’s all about cutting numbers and it’s not what a country is about.

I’m not sure what wakes me, because I’m already conscious when I hear a noise that could be my stomach or could be a door opening. I decide it’s the latter when it’s followed by footsteps heading for the bathroom, and a few seconds later the baby starts crying softly. It’s not loud at all, she’s only a week old and still before her due date, but something knots up in my solar plexus. Sounds that recur irregularly make me anxious, my body freezes on a precipice every time they stop waiting for them to start again. If they were only predictable it would be okay. I’m wide awake and thinking about the unanswered email from a student support person and the arch lever files of study material on the floor by my bed, and decide to see if it’s worth getting up yet.

It’s 3.35.

I settle back down. My flatmate goes back to bed and the baby goes quiet. Now the noise really is my stomach – I’m a grazer, eating small amounts throughout the day, and it’s been a while since dinner. Inexplicably, hunger makes my back hurt. I made biscuits the day before and they’re still in a tupperware container nearby, so eventually I grab one to tide me over until breakfast.

I close my eyes and drag the top of the duvet into the hollow between my head and shoulder. I’m not sleepy at all now but I try to clear my mind and hope it works. After a while I concede it does not.

Best way to see in the new year: playing Civilization V, drinking cider and listening to mash ups. And now suddenly we’re in a countdown to the election and me doing most of the rest of my BA. And, hopefully, dealing more with the mess that is my brain. With any luck in a few years I’ll be able to look back and see 2013 as a turning point where things started to improve, but there’s still a lot of work. For starters, WINZ still hasn’t put my disability allowance through so I can afford to see a psych, but because of the holidays I’m going to wait until next week before getting onto them about it.

I also have to consider realistic housing options if I’m not able to appeal the Supported Living Payment decision. That would likely consist of a choice between share house, flatting, and attempting to get subsidised housing through either HNZ or one of the third sector organisations, though waiting lists for those are incredibly long and there are only a limited number of places for only one person.

As for money, that will improve when I’m done with therapy. At the moment my disability allowance form lists me as needing 10 fortnightly sessions, so roughly halfway through the year if I don’t need to extend that I’ll be able to get the allowance for other costs instead.

I’m not going to make any resolutions. I don’t know what’s going to happen this year and if the last few have taught me anything it’s that the world is really good at throwing a spanner in the works. But hopefully I’ll end 2014 at least as well as I’m starting it, having also eaten a lot more delicious things, learned a lot of stuff, and said some smart words.

Not the usual sort of thing I post about, though I suppose you could make links between activities like gardening and cooking and their positive impact on mental health. It’s definitely something I find good, especially when you first see the shoots coming up out of the ground all tiny and green.

Normally I get my gardening information from the internet, because why wouldn’t you? General information is easy to find and books are expensive. So a book has to have something extra to it to be worthwhile, which I think this one might do. It’s called The Grower’s Cookbook by Dennis Greville & Jill Brewis and as you can probably guess, it’s a book both about gardening AND cooking! For me, this is one of those things that I struggle a little more with – I didn’t grow up experiencing a wide range of vegetables or ways of cooking with them, let alone herbs, so when it comes to figuring out what’s easy and practical to grow, combined with what I know how to use, I get a very short list.

The Grower’s Cookbook has three main sections: vegetables, herbs and fruit. Each plant in the section is listed in alphabetical order, with a good quality picture, summary, how to choose which variety/ies you want to grow, how best to do so, what problems you might have, the best ways to harvest and store, how to prepare, some tips for serving, and 1-2 recipes. They range from dips to salad dressings to full meals, and there’s also advice at the start on making jams and jellies and the like. It places a fair emphasis on companion planting, which means it tells you which plants have what benefits, what they should be planted with, what they should be kept away from, and if any come down with a disease not just what to do about it but whether you need to change what you plant in that soil.

When I have a place where I can have my own garden, I’m thinking it would be really useful to make a card for every plant that looks interesting and colour code them eg green for the ones that are really helpful for surrounding stuff, write down the most important things, and use the book to plot out what I should be growing. Since it says right in each section what sort of things I can make with the various veges and herbs and what else they go with, it should make it quite a lot easier to know what’s going to be the most useful for me, rather than going “Hmm, lamb’s lettuce? I guess I can do something with that… Oh, I like peas, chuck some of those down….” And unlike a regular cookbook, that means also that I’m more likely to find an interesting looking recipe and go, “Yeah, I have that in my garden, I can totally make this.”

The price tag at Whitcoulls was $13, though they’ve just had a big sale on that included 20% off books. (If you’re quick it might still be going on the website.) Being as that’s Whitcoulls, though, it might well be cheaper at other places, online or brick and mortar.

Just because sometimes we need a little levity, I’ve been watching out the window as my flatmate’s dogs made an exciting discovery: FOOD IN THE GROUND. Not my food, luckily (though I harvested my first couple of lettuces today to put in some vege stuffed bread, which was excellent), but some of the random potato plants that are just randomly growing places. This site happens to be in a planter that Daisy likes to lie in, which is presumably how she found them, but the first I noticed was frantic digging followed by her running off with something in her mouth. I’m not sure how many potatoes there were there to start with but by the time I finished laughing my arse off I managed to rescue two – both Daisy and Bailey had a check for more after I’d come back inside so I know I was thorough! Poor Daisy wasn’t too impressed with me taking them away, I don’t think. When I grabbed my diggy-weeding-fork she started walking in front of me making her funny talking noises. “Wo-wo-woh!”

I would have to go back and check to find out how long I’ve been trying to get in with mental health services up here, but I finally have an appointment tomorrow for a psych assessment. I’ll have to put it on my credit card, but then hopefully I can claim it back from WINZ as a special needs grant. This is both a relieving and terrifying way to end the week, which started on Sunday with me almost calling Lifeline (I ended up emailing them instead and haven’t had a reply, which I assume is indication of how underfunded they are, because they’re a mental health charity in New Zealand and the government doesn’t give a shit), poking my head up on Monday evening to wonder which gang rape everyone was talking about, avoiding Twitter for half the rest of the week, then getting a call on Tuesday to book this assessment. I have no idea how it’s going to go, despite having had psych assessments before, once for a service like this one and once after a suicide attempt.

I guess the trick is to present myself as urgent enough to bypass waiting lists but not urgent enough to need inpatient care. It’s funny, if you look for crisis mental health services, almost all the results tell you first off to call 111 and remove dangerous objects. Which, I mean, is good advice, but you get the idea looking at them that the only kind of mental health crisis the professionals acknowledge is a suicide (or homicide) attempt. I’ve heard dozens of stories about people who were turned away from urgent care because they said they weren’t going to kill themselves, whatever the reason for that (eg a solid promise to someone, deeply held religious beliefs, no effective way to do it and too much knowledge of what can go wrong if you don’t do it right). It’s similar in that sense, I guess, to my experience with Housing New Zealand.

Incidentally, on my contact course for Mana Māori, our kaiako told us a story about a class(?) she’d taken where they were discussing a kōrero tahito in which a character i whakamomori. The class was shocked – surely the preceding events hadn’t been bad enough to warrant suicide?! The speaker had to explain that whakamomori did not always mean committing suicide, but also, or perhaps rather or originally, to withdraw. These days we don’t have many options to withdraw. You have to be pretty independently wealthy, really, to be able to take time away from a job without having to justify it to the government, to have somewhere to retreat to, to supply yourself with food and whatever else you might need to sustain you. Anyone else gets hounded and harassed with demands to just get back to work and stop being lazy. You have to have appointments and meetings and assessments and run around collecting documents. It isn’t much of a withdrawal and it’s no wonder that so many people give up just because the hoops are too small or high to jump through and it’s easier to give in to the Protestant work ethic (tellingly typoed at first as worth) and keep dying a little inside. The first time I tried it it ended in a nervous breakdown. We’d do well to listen to other cultures sometimes.

I managed to get to see my new doctor today, and he seems pretty good. When I asked about a referral to DHB mental health services he said that they don’t do as much in the area that would be helpful to me and instead wrote me a letter for Phobic Trust, but if that doesn’t work out we’ll try DHB instead. He also clarified some points in my medical history and checked how things were going at the moment.

The letter for PT describes me as “presently presenting well”, which apart from the duplication (which is actually even funnier – it came directly after “both anxiety and depression present,”) makes me laugh a bit because it’s so “duh!” for me. When you’ve had depression your whole life you learn to hide it. If I wasn’t capable of “presenting well”, I would not be sitting in a doctor’s office, particularly one I’d never met before. I wouldn’t have left the house. I’d probably be in bed, like I was for four days last week after the DHB told me I had to find $85 to see a GP and gave me a phone number in case I wanted to kill myself. It would be easier to kill myself than to call a hotline in that state. I probably don’t “present well”, over the phone, when I’m suicidal, but I wouldn’t know. Avoiding presenting badly is instinct now and I can’t find a way to turn it off.

Even though this happened this morning until about half an hour ago, I need to backtrack a little to tell it properly. Normally I do not remember my dreams. If I do, I wake disturbed, exhausted, sweaty, with the sheets in a tangled mess. In these situations it’s invariably been a nightmare. Yeah, only remembering nightmares kind of sucks, alright. But the night before last I had a dream that wasn’t a nightmare and remembered (most of) it. I commented on it on Twitter so some people will have the jist, but basically it was a tv show about an insomniac whose dreams tell the future. I wasn’t watching tv, I was watching the events, but I knew it was a tv show anyway. It was interesting because extreme insomnia (worse than mine, he sometimes didn’t sleep for days at a time) produces a lot of symptoms and he was in the mental health system. Distractable, forgetful, really flaky, and in the worst patches prone to the occasional waking hallucination (which did not tell the future, they were just your standard hallucination). And with good writers you could probably actually do something pretty interesting with that material. Also while he was a main character who’s a guy (boring) he was also a) not socially awkward or avoidant, just had a hard time holding down friendships because of aforementioned side effects of insomnia and b) not a jerk, which two points set him apart from at least idk 60-70% of male main characters on tv. (Incidentally he, of course, makes new friends in the first episode. They’re a het couple who live together but call each other bf/gf so don’t sound as serious as they are. They are Patrick and Laura. I got the feeling Patrick was a cop and Laura was some kind of teacher, but I’m not sure.)

Anyway, that’s not DIRECTLY relevant here, it’s just background and context. Last night shortly before midnight I took my anti-depressant as usual, but didn’t have my usual sedative, so instead I took 2mg of lorazepam. My dose is supposed to be 1mg, but that was set ages ago and I’m starting to build a tolerance. I’m trying to keep usage down, still usually take 1mg, but since I didn’t have any seroquel I decided to take 2. Not sure if that had any bearing on this morning.

See, I woke about quarter to five, with a desperate need to see what time it was. Didn’t remember any dreams. Normally when I wake I lie in bed quietly for quite a while but today I needed to know the time. My phone wasn’t under my pillow where it usually is. I remembered putting it in the pocket of a zip up hoodie and fumbled around until I found the right pocket and got it disentangled from my keys. It had gone flat, so then I went and took out the charging cord for my tablet and plugged the phone charger into the usb socket in its place. I had to wait a little before it would turn on, let alone start up. Bear in mind that next to me, within easy reach, I had a computer (asleep but on), the tablet I’d just unplugged (fully charged and on) and my 3DS (plugged in, on and asleep), all of which have time displays.

So eventually I manage to find out the time on my phone and settle down a little. For some reason I decide I need to check my mail, because last night I’d sent several messages to my sister explaining more about my dream (see above) and I seem to have written a lengthy paragraph to Sarah this morning that I do remember writing but it’s starting to fade a bit. What I do remember is tweeting, quite a lot. Looking at the door to figure out if it was open (it wasn’t), deciding it should be open, getting up to open it and the curtain. Going outside to check on my plants while it was still dark, using my tablet’s screen as a light, and deciding that I’ll need to tie one of my peas up because it’s growing in the wrong direction. And I remember that everything made sense at the time. Completely perfect sense.

A lot of people’s first introduction to science comes in kindergarten or the first couple of years of school, growing a bean in a little cup. To be honest I can’t actually remember whether I did that or whether I just feel like I did from reading about it so much. Later we had cacti but otherwise I’ve never been much of a gardener. Well, not for the growing part anyway – I love the harvesting. My parents’ place has or had a heap of plants that pretty much looked after themselves – a lemon tree for a little while (by the time my mother replaced her orange Vauxhall when I was nine or so it had already been replaced by two huge sunflowers), a cherry tree for longer, strawberries (now tomatos and parsley), the massive feral raspberry bush in the little bit of land behind the garage that now holds four big compost bins and the dug-over pit that was our long drop in 2011. And, of course, the two that have been a constant – the plum tree out the patio door and the grape vine that stretches along the back fence. I spent a lot of autumn afternoons after school sitting on the lawn, backpack abandoned next to me because I’d yet to even go inside, eating the darkest grapes off bunches until I was full. There was so many that we never really ran out of them and my mother would turn some into grape juice, put it in old ice cream containers and freeze it. Earlier in the year – usually around January, during the school holidays – the plums ripen, and for a while it was always my job to get up into the tree to shake the branches or pick them straight off and drop them into a plastic New World bag, because I was small and light. One day when I have a rental place I know I can stay in for a few years I’m going to get someone to send me some cuttings from the grape vine and see if I can find a young damson plum tree.

Which brings me to the point. Home gardening is getting popular. I guess for some people it’s trendy. For others it’s the economy. Some people just enjoy it. It was partly the second for me, and partly that several people on Twitter were talking about it and the weather’s been warming up the last couple of years (I don’t know how much of this glorious sunshine is from being further north and how much is climate change, but it’s fantastic). You can probably spend a ton on a garden with mini greenhouses and seed trays and different kinds of soil and mulches and fertilisers and all those tools. Or you can do what I did – get a few 6L tubs and some potting mix off trademe, get a friend to mail you some seeds and put it all together. Some of the little seeds probably got lost in the soil because it has bits of bark and pumice in it, not the fine-grain soil that plugs up the tiny cracks they can fall down, but I’m going by the theory that nature has managed to grow plants for a lot longer than people have.

I planted six different kinds of seed, though the cucumbers might not be any good. So far three have sprouted. The broccoli and mini lettuce look pretty much the same – a gangly thin stalk, two spring-green leafs coming off it at the top. I think they’re bigger today than they are two days ago when I first saw them, putting the buckets back to their spot after the storm blew itself out. The peas are in one of the planter boxes because I spotted the unused stakes. I had eight seeds and I planted two at the base of each. Now there are six tiny furled green things poking out of the dirt – a couple of them close enough to the surface, now, that you can see the white balls they’re attached to. One of them I found about a foot away, so I think it got washed out of its place at some point, and I’ve carefully put it back, but even if it survives I have more pea plants than stakes. When they’re bigger I’ll get to pick the four best ones to keep. For now though they’re tiny – like when you look at an ultrasound of an early pregnancy and you can sort of see this shape, and know how it’s going to turn out, but right now you’re not entirely sure how it’s going to get there. I mean, obviously I’m not making an equivalency between a baby and plants, but it’s still sort of cool, making little holes in the soil and tipping some seeds in, covering them back up, and then patiently checking on them every day, making sure they’ve got enough water, until a couple of weeks later suddenly there’s these tiny spots of green peeking out. And one day they’ll be actual plants. Much bigger than they are now. Looking pretty damn different. And you’ll be able to break off pieces and eat them.

Okay, so the metaphor breaks down a bit at the end. But it’s still pretty damn fantastic, growing things.

This isn’t a problem I’ve had before: I have too many friends. The problem is that, being broken, I tend to like other people who are broken, who can relate to each other and not get impatient because they don’t understand why we can’t always do the things normal people can. Some breaks are bigger than others, of course, but most of us have cracks somewhere.

Just, when you put so many broken people together, someone’s probably always going to be having trouble. And this is the bit that really bothers me, because so often I want to do more to help than I know I can, and self-care means that sometimes I don’t even reply to tweets, which leads to feeling that I’m doing nothing for anyone. A few times I’ve felt like commenting on this but always it’s been soon enough after someone else’s hurt that it will look too much like a subtweet.

I’m not really looking for anything on this – mostly I’m procrastinating on finishing adding all my files to Zotero because jesus fuck why do I have so many and my back hurts from Daisy knocking me into the door. So now I’m going to eat free chocolate and maybe read for a while.